Rationality Quotes December 2013

Cyan

Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Yes. There is far too much idiocy in the world to spend time and effort on trying to make it look presentable.

I think an argument has to have some value going for it in the first place to make it presentable by steelmanning and the idea is to preserve the gist of what someone was trying to communicate. Batshit crazy just won't compute no matter how much you patch it with duct tape, and making a whole new argument from scratch (like reading the Bible or Mein Kampf metaphorically) doesn't count as steelmanning, I think.

Definitions, definitions...

2A1987dM12y

OTOH the result of doing that is sometimes just plain awesome.